L'A. defend la tradition esthetique contre la critique ethique et didactique de la litterature d'imagination, selon laquelle la valeur morale de la litterature reside dans son influence diffuse sur la pensee et l'action. Examinant le contenu moral et ideologique des oeuvres litteraires a travers les critiques de M. Nussbaum et W. C. Booth, l'A. montre que l'enseignement tire de la lecture releve plus de l'emotion que de l'experience, participant de la connaissance de soi et du plaisir artisitique

/pdf/against-ethical-criticism-16ehsenfdj.pdf

Against Ethical Criticism

And although there be some inconveniences, irksomeness, solitariness, &c. incident to such persons, want of those comforts [. . .] embracing, dalliance, kissing, colling, &c. those furious motives and wanton pleasures a new married wife most part enjoyes; yet they are but toyes in respect [. . .] and sufficiently recompenced by those innumerable contents and incomparable priviledges of Virginity. (Burton 570) 1

The Wrong Question: Thinking through Virginity

The first season of HBO’s popular series True Detective (2014), set in rural Louisiana, has garnered critical attention due to its postmodern sensibilities, postsecular metaphysics, and its star-studded cast, yet the show’s navigation of the industrial Gulf Coast remains under-examined. This essay focuses on what creator Nic Pizzolatto designates the “third lead” of the show—the poisoned landscapes of Louisiana’s ubiquitous petroleum industry. In a narrative that ostensibly invokes the Southern Gothic to cast its fictional corruption as regional peculiarity, the omnipresent spectacle of the petro-industrial complex implicates transnational networks of capital in the region’s “slow violence.” In this way, True Detective’s oily aesthetic provides a crucial framework through which to examine the ecologies of violence sustained by oil capitalism. Drawing on materialist ecocriticism such as Timothy Morton’s “dark ecology” and Stephanie LeMenager’s “petromelancholia,” this essay argues that True Detective’s visual emphasis on oil, which emerges most provocatively in the main title sequence, offers a crucial aesthetic strategy for representing the ambivalent pleasures and anxieties of US fossil-fuel modernity. As images of bodies and oil continually entangle through superimposition and dissolve, True Detective mobilizes a queer intimacy of human and environment that insists on apprehending petromodernity through its making and unmaking of identities.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/globalsouth.9.1.07

"I Get a Bad Taste in My Mouth Out Here": Oil's Intimate Ecologies in HBO's True Detective

During the religious reforms of the sixteenth century, traditionalists and reformers debated the physical nature of the Eucharist—which seemed to require two bodies to occupy the same place, or a single body to be in multiple places, at one time—within a shared framework of Aristotelian physics. In this tradition, any “thing” was a combination of underlying matter and a form which gave it shape and identity. Transubstantiation was of course the miraculous substitution during the mass of Christ’s body for the matter of the bread and the wine, while their outward forms remained the same as before. But many reformers challenged transubstantiation on the grounds not simply of theology, but of physics—that it was physically nonsensical. In the second half of the century this conundrum within theology and physics emerges as a quintessentially theatrical problem, embodied onstage in the recurring tropes of disguise, or of indistinguishable twins, even of the ordinary staging practices like the doubling of parts or the transvestite playing of women by boys. The plays of Shakespeare, his contemporaries, and their predecessors, West argues, both drew on and contributed to these debates by producing experiments in what we could call a “physics of performance.” The idea that one body might assume multiple identities was of particular interest to players, which of course their occupation required of them daily. Shakespeare’s plays show no clear allegiance to any particular physical theory of the world, instead displaying a readiness to make use of whatever world picture offered the most dramatic force in any situation. The character of Richard III, however, West argues, provides a sustained engagement with Aristotle’s physics, in particular the possibilities that open in a world made of unformed matter that can be repeatedly reshaped into multiple identities.

What's the Matter With Shakespeare?: Physics, Identity, Playing

This dissertation is a historical and theoretical study of the southern imaginary at the intersection of mass and regional culture. The focus is on two cinematic treatments of significant violent crimes in the region during the 1950s: firstly, the assassination of Albert Patterson, which prompted the clean of the “wide open” town of Phenix City, Alabama; and secondly, the murder of Emmett Till in Mississippi, which played a critical role in accelerating the African American freedom struggle. The Phenix City Story (Allied Artists, 1955), and Crisis in the Deep South, an unproduced 1956 screenplay written by Crane Wilbur, were both products of the media frenzy surrounding these actual events and they each involved investigation and research into local circumstances as part of their development and production. 
Rooted in film studies, history and cultural studies, the method of this thesis is to look backward to the foundational elements of the texts in question (e.g., the ‘raw material’ of the actual historical events,), and forward to the consequences of cinematic intervention into local commemorative regimes. In this way, I chart how the overlaps and interconnections between these film projects and others of the era reveal the emergence, consolidation and dissolution of a larger “cycles of sensation,” a concept outlined by Frank Krutnik and Peter Stanfield. The thesis offers a radical close reading of these texts to illuminate the complex relationship between Hollywood film and historical fact. 
The thesis examines southern exceptionalism and outlines the ways its romantic visions of “moonlight and magnolias” inform the treatment of the American South in the cinematic imagination, while tracing presentations of the modern American South through the popular hicksploitation cycle of the 1970s. The failed attempt to make a film out of the murder of Emmett Till in the 1950s demonstrates the limitations of Hollywood’s ability to address civil rights issues. My analysis of The Phenix City Story uncovers connections between the film’s racial melodrama and the Alabama town’s hidden history of racial violence and the Ku Klux Klan activity, while arguing for the role race played in the political corruption that the film’s narrative exposes.

Cinematic Memory and the Southern Imaginary: Crisis in the Deep South and The Phenix City Story

Over the past 20 years, feminist criticism has done more than any other form of literary criticism in bringing significant changes in how Shakespeare's works are read and studied. What is more, feminist criticism has changed the way English departments hire faculty, how the literary canon is conceived, how classes are taught and what gets published in journals. This anthology charts some of the major developments and accomplishments in Shakespearian gender studies over the last two decades. It includes readings in individual essays of "Much Ado About Nothing", "The Rape of Lucrece", "Hamlet", "Henry VI", "Othello", "The Tempest", "Richard III", "The Taming of the Shrew", "The Merchant of Venice" and "Twelfth Night".

Shakespeare and Gender: A History

Employing innovations in media studies, southern cultural studies, and approaches to the global South, this collection of essays examines aspects of the southern imaginary in American cinema and offers fresh insight into the evolving field of southern film studies. In their introduction, Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee argue that the southern imaginary in film is not contained by the boundaries of geography and genre; it is not an offshoot or subgenre of mainstream American film but is integral to the history and the development of American cinema. Ranging from the silent era to the present and considering Hollywood movies, documentaries, and independent films, the contributors incorporate the latest scholarship in a range of disciplines. The volume is divided into three sections: "Rereading the South" uses new critical perspectives to reassess classic Hollywood films; "Viewing the Civil Rights South" examines changing approaches to viewing race and class in the post - civil rights era; and "Crossing Borders" considers the influence of postmodernism, post colonialism, and media studies on recent southern films. The contributors to American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary complicate the foundational term "southern," in some places stretching the traditional boundaries of regional identification until they all but disappear and in others limning a persistent and sometimes self-conscious performance of place that intensifies its power.

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

Demystifying the Modern Mammy in Requiem for a Nun

Shakespeare Studies: Gender, Materialism, and the Cultural Other

Lecture lacanienne de The Sound and the Fury de W. Faulkner : le rapport problematique des trois freres au langage et a la negociation entre les registres de l'imaginaire et du symbolique ; leur relation respective avec Caddy, ultime metaphore paternelle de cette quete illusoire de la realite

Deborah E. Barker

Papers

Shakespeare and Gender: A History

American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary

Demystifying the Modern Mammy in Requiem for a Nun

Shakespeare Studies: Gender, Materialism, and the Cultural Other

Much Ado about Nothing: Language and Desire in 'The Sound and the Fury.' (Special Issue: William Faulkner)